Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible)

140 points by _pvzn ↗ HN
Personally, I think the JJ VCS (https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj) hit a point some time in this past year where I find it hard to find a great reason to continue using git. Over the years I've cobbled together aliases and bash functions to try to improve my git workflow, but after using jj, which works with ~any git repo and integrates great with Github repos, all of the workflow issues I ran into with git are not only solved, but improved in ways I couldn't manage with simple scripts.

One example is the op log, which lets you go to any point in your repo's time and provides simple undo and redo commands when you want to back out of a merge, didn't mean to rebase, etc.

Because I have a pretty strong conviction that JJ is at this point a cleaner and more powerful version of git, my hopes are that it continues to grow. With that, it seemed a proper full-featured GUI was missing for the VCS. There's some plugins that add some integration into VS Code, and there's one in the works to get Intellij support working, but many of the constructs JJ provides in my opinion necessitate a grounds-up build of a GUI around how JJ works.

Right now, [name-redacted] is an MVP in an open beta. I did my best to support all of the core functionality one would need, though there's many nice-to-haves that I am going to add, like native merge support, native splitting, etc. Most of this will be based on feedback from the Beta.

I'm really grateful for the great community JJ has built, alongside the HN community itself in the countless VCS-based posts I've read over the years, and am hoping for lots of input here during Beta under real usage - the goal is to be a full-featured desktop GUI for the VCS, similar to many of the great products that are out there for git.

24 comments

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Awesome would love to follow this journey
It's difficult to go back to a separate VCS app after using IDE git support (specifically VSCode & the 'git graph' extension which is sadly permanently abandoned).
VS Code now has an OKish git graph built-in, in case you didn't know. This feature is a few months old.
I think there’s a JJ vscode plugin
Thanks for working on this project!

It was mentioned on the JJ Discord server that there doesn't seem to be any information available about who you are. Especially since the project seems to be closed-source, perhaps you could share some information about who you are in order to build trust.

I hope you understand. I think users may hesitate to download and install the application without knowing anything about its publisher.

That's their choice, don't try to pressure them to self-dox. What is wrong with you / the "JJ Discord server"? Please identify yourself and everyone there so I can be sure to up my paranoia around each of you.
I wish this was open source. Even if you kept comments etc disabled.

Or if you shipped the source code alongside the binary. Or just had a zip of the source.

I haven't managed to try this because the "select repo" does nothing on Ubuntu 24.04. It doesn't seem I can actually perform any action at all.
Nitpick: "[name-redacted]" and "jujutsu" are already heavily used terms. Googling around for information about this, at least for me, is pretty difficult. [name-redacted] is an international olympic sport, jujutsu is one of the most famous traditional japanese martial arts, jiu jitsu is the most popular submission base for MMA...

I'd love a rebrand or rename in order to avoid having to work around the name collision.

Best of luck!

This is so cool. Man I need to find another line of work there are too many cracked devs out there
This looks great! Excited to try out out and play with it!
Since no one has asked. What is the tech stack?
This looks great though I like TUIs more. I’ve been using https://github.com/idursun/jjui for the last few months, I highly recommend it if you are a TUI person like me.
There are a lot of new use cases for VCSes with AI around.
not to be that annoying guy, but does anyone have a nix flake for this xD ?
Looks neat, have you considered releasing an AppImage for wider Linux support?
FWIW, there's another jujutsu GUI called [name-redacted]:

[url-redacted]

The website is now throwing a certificate error unfortunately.
The site and the GitHub org are down, and the name and URLs here are redacted —this is really weird!
For those coming to this thread after it was scrubbed, the author unfortunately felt they had to shut the project down after being pressured by their employer. The name is redacted and the website shut down.

For what it's worth, commentary from others on the JJ Discord suggested that this could not be a legally binding requirement as the author is located in California. California has laws that prevent employers from controlling employees inventions outside of work hours when using their own devices: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/labor-code/lab-sect-2870/